As I said in the two previous posts, “Slow Macbook pro – spring cleaning part one” and “Reinstall OSX – spring cleaning part two” I am trying to give my MacBook Pro (mid-2012, 13″ 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7) an overdue spring cleaning. The original disk in my MacBook was a 750GB Travelstar 5K1000 from HGST (a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital). I’m going to replace that with a Samsung EVO 850 1.0TB Solid State Disk. The original disk is a classic drive as you find in most computers over the last 20 or more years, a mechanical head moves over a rapidly spinning magnetic disk. By contrast, an SSD is a non-volatile memory technology that retains data when power is lost. An SSD is not really the same as something like a USB memory stick although they are built using some similar NAND memory. An SSD would have a controller in front of it providing error-correcting code (ECC), wear leveling, bad block mapping, Read scrubbing, read and write caching, garbage collection and encryption. Basically, an SSD has dedicated hardware to increase performance and provide resilience to data corruption. I just mention this to underline that just because SSD’s are used as disks in computers doesn’t mean that a 10.- CHF USB stick is an enterprise storage device!
Back when I bought the MacBook there were options to have SSD or SSHD’s (Hybrid drives or solid-state hybrid drives) for any extra arm and leg. Although, given I bought the MacBook from Apple as a reconditioned unit there was a limited choice. SSD storage is still expensive compared to a hard disk, I can buy a 1.0TB hard disk for as little as 66.- CHF, but the price of SSD has dropped. I was able to find a SAMSUNG SSD 850 EVO 1.0TB for 289.- CHF and I had a 15.- CHF voucher which knocked a bit more off.
Swapping the hard disk is a fairly simple task if you’re comfortable taking laptops apart, formatting disks and re-installing operating systems. I appreciate terming that simple is relative so it’s not something to embark on unless you’re comfortable with all the steps. There are a few guides on the net so I don’t think it’s worth repeating them. The one from Crucial is pretty good for example, MacBook Pro 13″ Unibody Mid 2012 SSD Installation. It’s worth pointing out that is particularly relevant as their SSD requires a spacer since it’s smaller than the shipped one. I was able to find a spacer here in Switzerland from Microspot who seem to stock most things and who also provided the actual SSD.
I had already created some installation media as I detailed in my other post (re-install OSX) so I just rebooted and installed OSX, fired up Google Drive to pull my data back, used Time Machine to pull back my Itunes and image libraries and that was all running again.
I’d say so! Here’s the Black Magic benchmark from the original, through a simple re-install with my final install on the SSD.
Basically, it’s gone from 40-50MB/s to around 500MB/S which is probably a little faster than I expected. This translates into faster times to do real work:
Initial boot time, from power up to being to do meaningful work: 29secs (reinstall: 46secs) (original disk: 3min 23secs)
Adobe Photoshop CC 2016: 5secs (reinstall: 18secs) (original disk: 1min 20secs)
Adobe LightRoom: 9secs (reinstall: 30secs) (original disk: 1min 25secs)
So, we’ll mark that up as a success I think.
Install SSD disk – spring cleaning part three As I said in the two previous posts, "Slow Macbook pro – spring cleaning part one…
